Who is Jurek Walter in Nocturne? Is he based on a real killer, and is he behind the kidnappings?
Stephen Graham's killer in Nocturne is locked in a cell, and he's still the most dangerous man in Pennsylvania.
Nocturne premiered on Apple TV on October 30 with two episodes, and the rest of its six-episode season arrives weekly through November 27. It's an American take on the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler, the pen name of the Swedish married couple Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, and it moves the story from Stockholm to a small town in western Pennsylvania. Joona Linna becomes Jonah Lynn, a retired homicide detective played by Liev Schreiber. Zazie Beetz plays FBI agent Saga Bauer, and Graham plays Jurek Walter.
Who Jurek Walter is
He's the serial killer Jonah put away. Over several years, Jurek kidnapped and tortured people and buried them alive, and he now lives in a restricted unit at Riverside Psychiatric Hospital. Jonah caught him with his partner, Samuel, who is Saga's father. Samuel later died by suicide after his own wife went missing.
The show establishes Jurek's methods before it says his name. The first episode opens on two prisoners talking. One is calm and encouraging, the other is falling apart, and by the end of the scene the calm one has talked him into taking his own life. The calm one is Jurek.
Is he based on a real killer?
No. Jurek is invented, and his authors have a rule against borrowing from real cases.
"We never use real killers or cases in our novels," Kepler told Crime by the Book.
They did study real ones. For The Sandman, the novel that introduced Jurek, they told The Real Book Spy they researched "the serial killers who appeared to be the most intelligent," then mixed that with their own fears. It worked a little too well: Jurek felt so real during the writing that "Alexandra had nightmares about him almost every night."
Is he behind the kidnappings?
Jonah has always thought so, and the first two episodes give him plenty to work with. Three years ago, siblings Michael and Felicia Frost disappeared, and they were suspected of being Jurek's last victims, though nobody could prove it. Then Michael turns up alive, in bad shape, walking on a bridge. Felicia is still missing.
The catch is that Jurek has been locked up the whole time. So far, the show points to help from outside:
- Michael was held at an abandoned construction site that only locals would know about, and it shows signs of recent use.
- He tells Jonah that a woman named Becca protected him and his sister. Jonah suspects Rebecca, Saga's mother, who disappeared years ago.
- Karl, a mild night-shift orderly played by Rory Culkin, starts carrying notes from Jurek to his lawyer.
- When Karl tries to back out, Jurek frames another orderly to keep him in line.
The investigation's answer is to put Saga next door. In episode 2, she goes into Riverside undercover as a patient, in the cell beside Jurek's.
Jurek is the one person on the show who can't leave his room, and the one everybody keeps going to see.
What the books say
Kepler's version of this story, The Sandman, is built on the same question. The boy who comes back describes a figure he calls the Sandman, whose visits put him and his sister to sleep, and Joona is convinced Jurek had a partner on the outside. Saga goes undercover in the ward there too.
Jurek doesn't stay in his cell for the rest of the books. By Lazarus, the seventh novel and the other book this season is based on, Saga has put three bullets in him, and Joona is the only one who believes he's still alive.
For the record: when Apple first announced the series in 2023, it was called Lazarus.
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